January 30, 2007

Happy Birthday, FDR

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Source: Annual Message to Congress, January 6, 1941 [commonly referred to as the Four Freedoms Speech] by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thirty-Second President
1933-1945.
President Roosevelt was born on this day in 1882 in Hyde Park, New York. He died: April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia.
See WhiteHouse.gov's very short biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt.